The Seagate Barracuda XT is the latest 2TB hard drive to land on our test bench, following on from the WD Caviar Black and Green and the Hitachi Ultrastar. It’s the largest capacity Seagate we have seen since the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 so you may think that Seagate was as keen as mustard to scatter review samples to the waiting …

@Reg: Tested on 2009-12-16?

Good in RAID?

It's a pity you couldn't test it in RAID. Sure, a mechanical spinny drive isn't going to saturate the interface, but they still have the highest/most cost effective storage capacity by far. Sticking 4 of these in a RAID array could make for some impressive speed increases. Looking at upgrading my 2TB RAID 5 array this year, and if someone makes a PCI-X SATA3 RAID controller, that could be quite good.

No advantage for a RAID

"""Sticking 4 of these in a RAID array could make for some impressive speed increases."""

Actually, you're looking at either A) The exact speed increase for using the same number of drives with SATA 2.0 or B) Going to saturate your controller. Drives don't share the 3 or 6 gbit speed, they each get that much bandwidth, so as long as your drives don't saturate SATA 2.0 (Which we can see that they do not,) you'll get no speed boost from 3.0. As an example, my 5 drive software raid 5, running on my (crappy) nvidia onboard SATA 2.0 ports can easily do sequential read and write at above 300MB/s, and that's with 2 year old drives.

So to sum up: it'll be years before high capacity spinning drives will be able to take advantage of SATA 3.0, RAID or not.